In a vote counted Monday, striking nurses at all eight Providence hospitals in Oregon accepted new labor contracts, paving the door for their return to work.
As a result, on Thursday, the majority of striking nurses will be returning to Providence’s hospitals. On Wednesday evening, those who perform night shifts will report for duty.
On January 10, over 5,000 employees of the Oregon Nurses Association, a union that represents healthcare professionals at all eight Providence hospitals in the state, went on strike. The hospitals in Hood River, Medford, Milwaukie, Newberg, Seaside, and Oregon City are among those impacted by the strike, along with Portland’s St. Vincent and Providence Portland Medical Center.
The nurses’ vote to approve their new contracts and put an end to the strike was welcomed by Providence.
According to a statement from the hospital chain, “We acknowledge the difficulties encountered over the last six weeks and are proud of these agreements that address issues the union bargaining teams identified as priorities during negotiations.”
A tentative agreement was reached on Friday between the union and the Catholic non-profit hospital system, over seven weeks into the biggest health workers’ strike in Oregon’s history. The union nurses at each hospital have to vote in favor of the accord.
The initial agreement their union made with the hospital chain was decisively rejected by nurses at all eight Providence hospitals about two weeks prior. The agreement, according to critics, did not sufficiently address issues with wages and personnel.
The most recent agreement, in contrast to the first one, includes raises that are effective retroactively for nurses whose contracts ended before to December. This would result in retroactive pay increases for nurses at St. Vincent, Willamette Falls in Oregon City, Milwaukie, Hood River, and Medford that would cover 75% of their hours worked in the previous year.
In the meanwhile, Providence Portland and Seaside nurses will get a $1,750 ratification bonus. This is because their contracts ended in December, which was more recent.
Additionally, nurses contended that the contracts they rejected earlier this month failed to sufficiently account for the severity of a patient’s illness when deciding how many patients each nurse would be allocated to. But according to the new contracts, Providence’s staffing plans must take into consideration the patients’ level of illness and care needs.
In a statement released by the union, Virginia Smith, a nurse and the bargaining team leader for the Oregon Nurses Association at Providence Willamette Falls Medical Center, stated, “We think that these contracts will result in greater recruitment and retention of frontline nurses as wages become more aligned with other health systems and we have staffing language that will allow us to spend more time with the patients that need the most care.”
In order to increase their negotiating leverage in future talks, particularly in the case of a possible strike, nurses throughout the health system had also sought to align their contracts. The contract expiration dates of the rejected contract proposal varied.
However, a number of hospitals’ contract expiration dates are aligned with the new deal. The contracts for nurses at St. Vincent, Milwaukie, Willamette Falls, and Newberg, for instance, would end in December 2026. The contracts for Providence Portland and Seaside would end in December 2027, while those for Hood River and Medford would expire in March 2027.
After 11 of the 12 members of the Portland City Council wrote to the administrators of the health system pushing them to get back to the negotiating table, Providence’s and the striking nurses’ face-to-face mediation sessions resumed last week.
Additionally, the agreement was reached just days before Providence announced that it would terminate the striking employees’ health insurance coverage at the end of the month, and five weeks after the majority of them had received their last salary.
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Following their ratification of their first labor deal with the health system, about 80 employees of Providence’s six women’s clinics in the Portland region who went on strike at the same time as the nurses returned to work early this month.
The first-ever labor agreement between Providence and a group of 70 hospitalists and palliative care physicians at St. Vincent Medical Center, who just joined the Pacific Northwest Hospital Medicine Association, was also authorized. The doctors stayed on the picket line until Saturday, despite having ratified their own contract over two weeks prior. According to Providence, the majority of them have subsequently gone back to work.
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